IU Legal Counsel George Shur predicts that the Title IX complaint filed last week by Pat Marino, the mother of 1991 Huskie field hockey player Karin Marino, could take months to fix.

Gender equity in NIU athletics has been in a lot of discussion over the past year since the removal of the field hockey team. NIU Athletic Director Gerald O’Dell and the athletic department will respond to the complaint but he says that there is nothing wrong with the division of funds and opportunities for women’s athletics at NIU.

“We’ll have to do mounds of paperwork and deal with many details as far as how our program is actually run in compliance with Title IX,” said O’Dell. “I do know that we completed an exhaustive Title IX study by people from our campus, and the response was very positive.”

The decision to exchange the field hockey program with the women’s soccer program has caused much concern that opportunities for women are not as numerous as when NIU still provided field hockey as one of its NCAA Division I-A programs. However, O’Dell thinks the complete opposite.

“We’re going to provide so many more opportunities for young people through the implementation of women’s soccer than we would have through field hockey,” O’Dell said.

Some confusion has been exchanged about the complaint being a lawsuit, but O’Dell assures that it is nothing more than a complaint.

“It’s not a lawsuit,” said O’Dell. “It’s just a complaint. It’s like saying ‘somebody is doing something that’s possibly improper. Please investigate.’ It is in no court. It is not a lawsuit.”

Though it is not a lawsuit there will still be some sort of investigation to see if anything is wrong with NIU’s compliance of Title IX. Questions have been brought up as to whether the complaint is a serious threat or not.

“Any complaint must be taken seriously,” Shur said. “What happens is if they find some problems, we will try to settle the case. If we discover some glitches, we’ll fix them.”